Paul B. Moody

Business activity patterns: a new model for collaborative business applications

In this paper, we describe the vision behind the Unified Activity Management project at IBM Research. In particular, we describe and discuss activities, activity-centered computing, and activity patterns and illustrate the potential impact of this approach and its value to individuals, teams, and the enterprise. We discuss business activities and their integration into the development of business processes. We share insights from user studies and feedback from customers on the benefits of the activity model in a variety of business settings.

Managing collaborative activities in project management

People working with current ad-hoc collaboration tools suffer from information overload and information scattered. Our five-month study of project managers found their work was comprised of fragmented activities implicitly organized by activity threads. Most of these activities were communicative to track and report project status, which introduced frequent interruptions and low efficiency. Accordingly, we explored an activity centered approach to help them manage work information. In our Activity Centric Project Management prototype, solutions like integrating activity with project task, providing timely activity awareness based on RSS, utilizing activity data to generate status report, and allowing third-party easily to update task status were introduced.

Lightweight collaborative activity patterns in project management

People working with ad-hoc collaboration tools suffer from information overload and information scatter. Our five-month study of project managers found their work comprised of fragmented activities scattering in task, people and application. However, these loosely coupled collaborative activities were implicitly organized by hierarchical activity threads through intrusion and digression, and geared into work breakdown structure (WBS) in high level. Our investigation gives implications on making peoples work manageable as well as flexible, by integrating lightweight collaborative activities with centralized processes.